We Tried These Shopify Alternatives: Which One Should You Use?

See how the top Shopify competitors compare in all the key areas with our handy table below…

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Wix	Squarespace	GoDaddy	Hostinger	BigCommerce	Square Online
Overall rating 4.8	Overall rating 4.7	Overall rating 4.2	Overall rating 4.0	Overall rating 4.0	Overall rating 3.8
Starting Price $29 $26.10 with code “TAKE10”	Starting Price $23 $20.70 with code “WBE10”	Starting Price $20.99	Starting Price $3.99 (+ 3 months free)	Starting Price $29	Starting Price $29
Transaction Fees 2.9% + $0.30	Transaction Fees 0% – 3%	Transaction Fees 2.7% + $0.30	Transaction Fees None	Transaction Fees None	Transaction Fees 2.9% + $0.30
Payment options 80+ including: Paypal, Wix Payments, Stripe, Square	Payment options 5+ including: Squarespace Payments, Stripe, Square, PayPal	Payment options GoDaddy Payments, PayPal, Stripe, Square	Payment options 20+ including: PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Google Pay	Payment options 36 including: Paypal, Square, Stripe, Klarna	Payment options 4: Credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square
Sales features 4.2	Sales features 3.7	Sales features 2.8	Sales features 3.3	Sales features 4.6	Sales features 3.3
Multichannel integration	Multichannel integration	Multichannel integration	Multichannel integration	Multichannel integration	Multichannel integration

Starting Price: $29 $26.10 per month with 10% off with code TAKE10

Read our full Wix Ecommerce Review for more

Key Differences

While Shopify is the best platform for selling products in our research, a good online store can do a lot more than just that. What makes Wix our best alternative for Shopify is its commitment to great features, both sales-related and not.

From Wix Booking and Wix Hotels, to Wix Menu and the newly added Wix Donations, Wix has a dedicated built-in app for whatever your business needs. Shopify, on the other hand, requires third-party plugins for a lot of features that aren’t directly related to selling – many of these also come with a subscription fee.

Wix’s greater range of built-in features gives you more control over how your site operates, especially with how much more freedom Wix’s editor gives you. The drag-and-drop grid overlay that appears when you’re designing lets you place elements wherever you want, and each section can be customized by size, color, font, and even animations.

Template-wise, Wix’s designs speak for themselves. Each one is professionally curated and covers many industries, however, once your site is live you won’t be able to change it. This means if you don’t like you’ll have to start again from scratch. Wix’s templates are all free too, but if you can’t find one you love, you can use Wix’s ADI to have AI create a personal template. Shopify has no AI website builder and only 12 free templates for its users, otherwise, you may have to pay a one-time fee of between $75 and $350 for a premium store theme.

While Wix has its benefits, Shopify beats it for dedicated sales features. For one, it lacks the sheer amount of multichannel integrations Shopify has – even with Wix being one of the only builders on this list that could accommodate a large online store (thanks to the Business Elite plan). However, the easier building and editing, plus better value for money, make Wix the very best alternative to Shopify – and we recommend it to those looking for a simpler-to-use ecommerce platform.

How Much Is Wix’s Pricing?

Wix’s pricing offers three ecommerce plans:

• Core – $29 per month (billed annually)
• Business – $36 per month (billed annually)
• Business Elite – $159 per month (billed annually)

When compared against Shopify, we found that Wix’s plans are better value for money. Wix’s plans came with more built-in features, better design customization, and fewer additional fees.

Wix also comes with an unlimited free plan, meaning you can try it out at your leisure, as you will have to upgrade to be able to accept payments. Shopify, meanwhile, only gives users a super short 3-day trial to get to grips with the platform. Additionally, if you use code TAKE10 at checkout, Wix is offering 10% off on all pricing plans.

Starting Price: $23 $20.70 per month with 10% off using code WBE10

Read our full Squarespace Ecommerce Review for more 

Key Differences

Squarespace is the easiest platform to build a polished online store. Even more so than Wix, Squarespace’s drag-and-drop editor makes designing your site a breeze. Our own testers even remarked that they found it hard to build a bad site on Squarespace!

Combined with this are its impeccably designed free templates, some of which are designed by famous designers and photographers – like the Magnum Collection – and can shoot your store to stylistic heights without having to pay any upfront fees.

While there are no template fees like Shopify, Squarespace does sadly have rather high transaction fees on its cheapest $23 per month Business ecommerce plan. Squarespace charges a 3% transaction fee for each purchase on this plan.

On top of this, Squarespace does not have payment options for either Amazon Pay or digital crypto wallets, unlike Shopify.

Despite that, Squarespace’s sales features scored the same as Wix in our research, and give you everything you need to run a successful online store. Previously, the Squarespace inventory system was limited, not letting you upload in bulk. This feature was fixed, and with the Acuity Scheduling tool, Squarespace supports selling both products and services. For this reason, and its amazing design tools, Squarespace is uniquely suited to artists wishing to sell their works (or time).

How Much Is Squarespace’s Pricing?

Squarespace’s pricing has three ecommerce plans:

• Business – $23 per month (billed annually)
• Commerce Basic – $28 per month (billed annually)
• Commerce Advanced – $52 per month (billed annually)

It’s worth noting that although Squarespace’s Business plan is its cheapest ecommerce option, it does come with a 3% transaction fee. We recommend skipping this one and jumping straight to the Commerce Basic plan which is better value for money and gives you access to a wider range of ecommerce features.

Although it doesn’t have a free plan, Squarespace does have a 14-day free trial, which should be enough for you to build your site and see if it is for you. Also, if you use our exclusive code WBE10, you can get 10% off at checkout.

Starting Price: $20.99 per month

Read our full GoDaddy Ecommerce Review for more

Key Differences

GoDaddy isn’t the best provider when it comes to sales features – unlike Shopify, ecommerce functionality is secondary to its website building. It only offers one ecommerce plan, and you can only sell a maximum of 5,000 products.

However, what sets it apart from Shopify – and other builders on this list – is its amazing marketing suite GoDaddy Studio. GoDaddy gives its users a full creative content studio to make branded ads and videos for social media, as well as create email marketing campaigns as GoDaddy gives you 100,000 emails per month. You may not be able to sell as many products, but GoDaddy certainly gives you the tools to market them heavily.

If you are the type that likes to design your website, you might find GoDaddy’s creative tools lacking. The editor is super simplified to the point that anyone can make an online store with GoDaddy, but this also limits the amount of choice you can have. Like Wix, GoDaddy has an ADI service that builds you a personal site, but if you choose one of GoDaddy’s templates, they can seem outdated and a bit dull.

A benefit to this more stripped-back builder is that GoDaddy has the fastest building experience we’ve tested. Our testers were able to get a GoDaddy website live in under five minutes! If you want an online store for an appointment-based business, and you don’t have the time to parse Shopify’s sales features, GoDaddy may be the alternative for you!

How Much Is GoDaddy’s Pricing?

GoDaddy’s pricing offers one ecommerce plan, at $20.99 per month, billed annually. This is quite steep when you consider the features it offers. At this price, we’d only recommend GoDaddy for those who want a website before an online store, or those who want a quick, hands-off building experience.

Starting Price: $3.99 per month

Read our full Hostinger Website Builder Review for more

Key Differences

Much like GoDaddy, Hostinger is more website builder first, ecommerce second. While you won’t get the same quality of sales features and scalability as Shopify, it is much simpler to use and hassle-free thanks to its AI tools, and can certainly manage a small online store.

Hostinger has really jumped head first onto AI adoption. While Shopify has Shopify Magic for generating product descriptions, Hostinger comes with an AI Website Builder, AI Logo Maker, AI Text Generation, and AI Heat Map. All of these tools serve to help spread out the labor of website building, giving you more time on the business side of your online store.

On the sales side, Hostinger is not suited for big, enterprise stores like Shopify. You can only sell 500 products, which is quite a limited amount, even as a small business. However, our testers noted that adding products to Hostinger was very simple. Overall, we’d recommend Hostinger to users on a budget who want an easy and simple online store for a small range of products – like homemade knitwear or custom metalwork.

How Much Is Hostinger’s Pricing?

Hostinger’s pricing ranges from $2.99 to $3.99 (for a 48-month term), but you’ll need the $3.99 Business Website Builder plan to sell online. This is the cheapest starting price on this list and the only major argument for choosing it over Shopify.

Users who sign up today will additionally get the first three months for free, meaning you can create, sell, and make back the cost of the online store before you even have to pay for it.

Starting Price: $29

Read our full BigCommerce Review for more

Key Differences

What makes BigCommerce stand out is its sales features, which are just as comprehensive as those you’d get with Wix or Squarespace. You’ll have everything you need to start selling, as well as multiple storefronts and unlimited products and file storage available on all plans to encourage your growth.

Some of its most impressive sales features include multi-channel integration, extensive reporting tools, abandoned cart features, and multiple shipping options. Plus, BigCommerce enables more payment options than our top five builders, so it’s great for businesses wanting to give their customers lots of choice.

While BigCommerce has an app store, most of its important features are built into the builder, which differs from Shopify’s heavy reliance on third-party apps. The cost of these apps adds up quickly, and you could find yourself paying a lot more than the initial subscription fee. So you could save money with BigCommerce, because it’s not as likely that you’ll need to pay for extra apps to get the functionality you want.

Also, unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees on any of its plans, which will save you a lot of money over time.

In terms of website design, BigCommerce has 12 free templates, which is close to Shopify’s 13. However, Shopify’s free templates feel thoughtfully designed, whereas BigCommerce’s are more generic, so its paid options feel necessary for an eye-catching website.

Both BigCommerce and Shopify use a section-based editor. While BigCommerce’s web page builder is more user-friendly than Shopify’s, it offers a lot less control over formatting.

How Much is BigCommerce’s Pricing?

BigCommerce and Shopify both have three core plans which are charged at identical monthly prices.

BigCommerce’s plans are called:

• Standard – $29 per month (billed annually)
• Plus – $79 per month (billed annually)
• Pro – $299 per month (billed annually)

We’d recommend the Plus Plan as the best value for money, because it unlocks a lot of sales features that will help you scale your business.

BigCommerce also offers a generous 15-day free trial which, compared to Shopify’s speedy three days, is more than enough time to test out the builder’s capabilities for yourself.

Starting Price: Free

Read our full Square Online Review for more

Key Differences

The number one thing to note about Square Online is it’s free to sell on the platform. You can sell an unlimited amount of products, both physical and digital, as well as offer curbside delivery – plus create gift cards and coupon codes. All for free!

However, the free plan also has its limitations. First of all, you don’t get a custom domain and your website is plastered with Square Online branding, which doesn’t look very professional. You also won’t get access to abandoned cart emails, or customer reviews unless you upgrade, plus you’ll be subjected to more expensive processing fees (2.9% + 30¢ per transaction).

Design-wise, Square Online doesn’t offer much variety. There’s very limited customization for the templates, and each template is set for mobile view by default, meaning you’ll have to change if you’re using a desktop.

While Square Online’s templates don’t exactly sparkle, its commitment to in-person ecommerce does. Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants are two dedicated add-ons for Square for each receptive industry, helping you instruct employees, sync orders and even manage multiple locations from the Square Online dashboard.

These work in tandem with Square Online’s impressive range of POS systems, which can take payments in person. Compared to Shopify’s own POS terminals which cost $349 each, Square Online’s only costs $299, making it the more affordable and our personal recommendation for in-person businesses.

How Much Is Square Online’s Pricing?

As well as its free plan, Square Online’s pricing has two paid plans to choose from:

• Plus – $29 per month (billed annually)
• Premium – $79 per month (billed annually)

As we mentioned, the free plan – while certainly an attractive offer – isn’t actually suitable for an online store’s success. The limitations are too severe for any meaningful online scalability. However, if you plan on utilizing Square Online to sell in person, we recommend you choose the free plan and buy a POS reader instead.

There are a lot of options out there, so this choice can quickly start to feel overwhelming. But the best way to choose a Shopify alternative is to identify what you really don’t like about Shopify – once you have a specific weakness in mind, it’s just a matter of choosing the platform that’s really strong in that area.

All the builders on this list are featured because they do something better than Shopify. Choosing an alternative is about figuring out and then honing in on your priorities.

Obviously, someone who wants to open a small online store for homemade cupcakes is going to have different priorities than someone seeking to open a large, multinational clothing enterprise. However, through our own experience, we can at least present some universal priorities each person should be looking at when picking an ecommerce website builder:

• Is the website builder good value for money?
• Does it have all the sales features I need?
• Is it well-suited for the products I want to sell?
• Can it grow with my business, or will I have to switch down the line?
• Is it easy to use, even as a beginner?

You should have everything you need to make your choice for a Shopify alternative. However, if you still can’t make a decision, why not try our quiz for a personalized recommendation?

Every provider we talk about is rigorously researched and tested by not only our in-house research team but all of our writers too. This means we have a near-comprehensive knowledge base of each builder, that gets updated each year in a research boot camp.

Through this research methodology, we can organize and rank each builder across a multitude of categories, including separate research sections for website building and ecommerce. For this list, we referenced our research and picked our top alternatives to Shopify, based on their overall ecommerce scores.

But that’s not all. We didn’t just want to include them due to their closeness to the top. So we tailored each provider on what they do better than Shopify, so you can have a clearer idea of what alternative is better for you.

All platforms on this list come with a free trial so that you can find out which is best for you totally risk-free. We highly recommend jumping on a free trial (or two) to find out which Shopify competitor is best for you!

But, for our personal recommendation, Wix offers the best value for money and it’s extremely beginner-friendly. Not only that, but its ecommerce features cover everything that an online store could need.

There’s a full breakdown of our thoughts on Wix vs Shopify if you want more information on which platform’s better. Otherwise, that’s it from us. Let us know in the comments who your favorite Shopify alternative is.